Tal Goretsky Experiments with Paper for the cover of Dara Horn's Eternal Life
Tal Goretsky is an Art Director at Putnam, an imprint of Penguin Random House. He has previously designed books at Crown, Scribner, and Penguin Press.
Eternal Life is a novel about a woman born in ancient Jerusalem, about 2,000 years ago, who is still alive today in New York City. She makes a pact with her lover and ends up cursed with immortality. Whenever she sets herself on fire, she dies and is reborn as an 18 year-old, with all her memories intact.
I worked on these comps for Ingsu Liu at Norton, for hardcover. Although they were killed for hardcover, Steve Attardo contacted me about using the final one (paper flames on flame background) on the paperback.
Final cover
I really enjoyed the depiction of ancient Jerusalem and the story that took place there. I made a nod to the present by putting a 20th Century image of Manhattan in one of the paper flames.
When I was a kid, I visited a diorama of the ancient city of Jerusalem in Israel. It’s a gigantic scale model you can walk through, similar to the one of NYC in the Queens Museum. I loved how the ancient temple looked, and was kinda obsessed with depicting it somehow on some of these comps.
Funny enough, I had worked on some comps for Little Fires Everywhere for Darren Haggar a short time before I began this project. Those comps were killed, but I did develop the paper flames idea at that time. Lucky break that I got to use them on another book ☺
Cover concept
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.